The author examines the perceptions of victory and failure in counterinsurgencies throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries, and compares those perceptions with the British experience in Northern Ireland and the U.S. experience in Iraq. Most importantly, the monograph addresses the definition of a COIN victory in terms of Russell Weigley’s The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, and Colin Gray’s analysis and argument that the American public, strategic, and military cultures do not agree upon the definitions within counterinsurgency.